Village Affairs

by Cassandra Chan

  There was a fire burning in the sitting room, obliterating the chill of the October evening. Cerberus lay down before it while Bethancourt accepted a glass of cognac and then collapsed into the corner of the sofa.

  “I can’t think,” he said, “why driving should always make one feel so grubby. The car’s perfectly clean, after all.”

  “You look tired,” said Astley-Cooper.

  Bethancourt removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes a moment before replacing them.

  “It was a long day,” he said.

  Astley-Cooper, in contrast to his guest, was perched on the edge of his chair, his eyes bright with curiosity. “And was Eve Bingham’s cousin a sinister fellow?” he asked.

  “Not a bit of it,” answered Bethancourt. “He was a perfectly ordinary math teacher with a solid alibi. I’m certain he had nothing to do with it.”

  Astley-Cooper looked disappointed and Bethancourt smiled.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “the hotel staff were unable to give Eve an alibi, so she’s still in the running. And I did find out why Derek Towser has such a reputation as a womanizer. Apparently a woman whose portrait he painted had an affair with him, and her fiancé subsequently cancelled their wedding.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Astley-Cooper. “Julie Benson heard the story from some friends of hers in London and that’s how we got to know of it down here.”

  “Oh,” said Bethancourt, rather crestfallen. “I never thought to ask you. By the way, is there any news this end?”

  Astley-Cooper shook his head. “Martin Winslow barred Josh Landon from the Deer and Hounds last night,” he replied, “and I ran into the Bensons this morning, who say Joan Bonnar will be visiting on Sunday, but that’s all.”

  Bethancourt smiled. “That’s not nothing,” he said.

  “Well, but it doesn’t have to do with the subject in hand. Go on with what you were saying.”

  Bethancourt, unable to remember what that might have been, shrugged and said, “Anyway, I have several feelers out for information about Eve and her relationship with Charlie, so maybe one of them will bear fruit.”

  “Did Marla agree to nose around in Paris?”

  “In the end,” said Bethancourt wryly. “And I wouldn’t call it ‘nosing around’ to her face if I were you.”

  “Well, she might find something anyway.”

  Bethancourt yawned. “There may be nothing to find,” he said. “The girlfriend is still the best bet.”

  Astley-Cooper considered this. “What about the sleeping tablets?” he asked. “Have you found out where they came from?”

  Bethancourt shook his head. “No. Presumably they came from the girlfriend, since nobody else seems to have access to Seconal.”

  “But mightn’t he have borrowed them from a friend?” asked Astley-Cooper. “People do trade their prescriptions around, even though they’re not supposed to. Yes, listen to this: supposing he’d had a near accident with his car that day, on the way to wherever it was. He might have been feeling jumpy and taken a pill to calm himself down.”

  “I should think,” said Bethancourt, “he’d have been more inclined to have a drink.”

  “Well, he did do,” said Astley-Cooper. “Perhaps it didn’t do the trick, so he had a pill as well.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Bethancourt. “I will admit that if one had trouble sleeping, one might borrow a pill from a friend, but I can’t see anyone taking a sleeping tablet just to calm down. Especially not someone like Bingham, who’d spent the last fifteen years in the remoter areas of China. He can’t have been terribly pill-conscious, so to speak.”

  “There you go,” said Astley-Cooper, getting excited. “It comes back to that girlfriend of his. He goes to see her, and they have a drink. Then they, er, you know, but he can’t sleep afterward. So she says, ‘Have one of my sleeping pills.’ And it does him in.”

  Bethancourt was amused. “But, Clarence,” he said, “Bingham died before nine P.M. Even if he had been engaging in a romantic interlude, why should he have wanted to sleep so badly that he took a pill?”

  “Oh,” said Astley-Cooper sorrowfully, “I’d forgotten about the time. I don’t seem to be very good at this kind of thing after all. I expect it can’t have been an accident, then.”

  “I suppose,” said Bethancourt slowly, “someone might have meant to just knock him out for a bit. But why should anyone want to do that? I’m an imaginative fellow, but I can’t think of a reason. Not one that makes sense, anyhow.”

  “But there’s not much more reason for anyone to want him dead,” argued Astley-Cooper.

  “There’s the money,” said Bethancourt.

  “Yes, but no one knew he had it.”

  “Eve did.”

  “Oh, yes, she did, didn’t she?” Astley-Cooper shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight. How on earth do you manage it?”

  “Practice,” said Bethancourt sleepily. “Next time you’ll do better.”

  “I don’t want there to be a next time,” replied Astley-Cooper. “It’s all very well to sit around the fire of an evening, speculating. But, well, old Charlie’s dead, isn’t he? And I liked Charlie, Phillip. We all did.”

  “Jack and the chief inspector will sort it out,” said Bethancourt soothingly. “They always do.”

  Bethancourt woke late the next morning and found himself deserted. Gibbons and Carmichael, when he rang, had already left the pub, and Astley-Cooper had left him a somewhat incoherent note from which he deduced that his host had some sort of business in Cirencester.

  Accordingly, he took Cerberus for a long walk around Stutely Manor’s extensive park, and then drove into the village in search of lunch. He parked in the square and was just opening the back door for his dog when he caught sight of the vicar emerging from the newsagents. He was dressed as usual in his cassock, with a brown tweed jacket over it, and today had added a scarf knitted of brilliant blue, red, and yellow. Bethancourt assumed it had been a parishioner’s gift.

  He greeted Bethancourt cheerfully and bent to pat Cerberus.

  “We’ve been wracking our brains,” he announced, “trying to remember bits and pieces of Charlie’s conversation. It’s made a wonderful change from writing my sermon.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bethancourt guiltily. “I didn’t mean to put you off your sermon.”

  “Nonsense,” said the vicar, “we’ve rather enjoyed it. And writing a sermon every week is one of the things I like least about being a clergyman.”

  “I suppose it must be rather tiresome,” said Bethancourt. “Like having essays at school.”

  “Sometimes it’s all right,” said Tothill guardedly. “Sometimes, when I’ve been reading up some theology or something, it all comes together beautifully as soon as I sit down to write. But one can’t expect that to happen every week, and mostly it’s a bit of a struggle. Of course,” he added, cheering, “it’s better since I was married.”

  “Your wife helps you write your sermons?”

  “Not exactly. But she gives me lots of ideas, inadvertently, as it were. Here, are you doing anything just now? Because, if not, you could come along to the vicarage with me, and we could tell you what we’ve thought of. Leandra’s making lunch, but we can sit in the kitchen and she can talk while she cooks.”

  Bethancourt agreed to this proposition, and they turned together down the High Street. The sky was beginning to clear from the gray of the early morning, and they were bathed in shafts of golden light as they made their way toward the vicarage.

  “It must be nice,” said Bethancourt, thinking of Marla and the amount of persuasive charm he had had to use in order to secure her agreement to ask around about Eve and Charlie in Paris, “to have a wife who helps you in your work.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Tothill, with positive enthusiasm. “Leandra’s made an enormous difference in my life. I never thought, when I first met her, that she would ever take to being a country vicar’s wife, but it suits her
very well.”

  “I understand,” said Bethancourt a little cautiously, “that she wasn’t immediately accepted here, however?”

  The vicar only laughed. “That’s putting it mildly,” he said. “Let’s face it: when I first came here, about the only people who were happy to see me were the mothers with young daughters who thought it would be lovely if Sally could marry the vicar. They weren’t at all pleased when I brought back a London woman with a wicked past. Of course, they didn’t know about Lee’s past, but they assumed it anyway.”

  “It must have been awfully rough going for you.”

  “Oh, we didn’t mind so much, we were so happy together. Leandra positively delighted in thinking up little things to do that would bring people ’round. No, it was before I married that things were rough. I was seriously thinking of giving up the clergy then. I was so pleased about getting this living, you see, I suppose I looked forward to it too much.”

  “Everyone’s guilty of that at some time or another,” said Bethancourt. “I don’t think there’s anyone alive who hasn’t spoiled a perfectly good thing by expecting too much of it. Of course, that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens.”

  “No,” agreed the vicar. “And I—who had always prided myself on being so pragmatic—wasn’t sensible at all about this. I had some idea of just stepping into the role of vicar and having everything fall into place, and naturally it didn’t happen that way at all. I was too young—at least, that’s what everyone in the parish thought—and even if I’d been ninety, I was a different man from the one they’d been used to for the last thirty years.”

  “What changed it ’round for you?” asked Bethancourt.

  “Leandra,” answered Tothill. “I was really a very lonely man when I met her, although I didn’t realize it. I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone. Frankly, things never seemed to work out for me in that way and I’d more or less made up my mind to being a bachelor for the time being. But God was looking out for me, though I didn’t know it until I met Lee. She made me so happy, I just plunged ahead, despite all my doubts. I kept looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s beautiful, but is she a vicar’s wife?’”

  “Presumably,” said Bethancourt, pausing to light a cigarette, “she was more sure than you?”

  “Oh, yes.” The vicar grinned. “She said she didn’t see why she wouldn’t make a perfectly wonderful vicar’s wife so long as the vicar in question was me.”

  Bethancourt smiled. “And she was right, in the end.”

  “Definitely. I’ve never been this happy, never enjoyed life so much. It’s like a whole new life, really. And Leandra’s happy, too. It’s incredible, how fond we are of each other. Well, here we are. We might as well go ’round to the back door, if you don’t mind.”

  Leandra Tothill, reflected Bethancourt, certainly looked happy. She greeted her husband with enthusiasm, and urged Bethancourt to make himself comfortable at the kitchen table. He took a chair and let his eyes travel over her, secretly amused. If the vicar’s tweed jacket was incongruous with his cassock, his wife was just as eccentrically dressed. She had put on a gray sweater and wool skirt with a chef’s apron tied over all, and had tied back her hair with a bit of shocking pink fabric that looked as if it might have come out of the ragbag. Her legs were bare, and she had pulled a pair of thick, oversized socks over her feet in lieu of slippers; they drooped about her ankles.

  “Would you like a drop of beer?” asked the vicar. “It’s ham sandwiches for lunch. You will have one, won’t you?”

  “Today’s great idea,” said Bethancourt happily. “Cerberus,” he added, frowning, “leave Mrs. Tothill alone.”

  Leandra was standing at the counter, carving slices from a large ham, and Cerberus was glued to her side, tail wagging eagerly.

  “Can’t he have a bit?” asked Leandra, arresting the downward movement of her hand in which she held a sliver of ham.

  “He can if you want to give it to him,” said Bethancourt. “But he won’t stop asking afterward.”

  “That’s all right,” said Leandra cheerfully, holding out the tidbit for the Borzoi. “He’s really remarkably well-behaved. Did you train him yourself ?”

  “He was housebroken when he came to me. I got a book and did the rest myself. It took awhile.” Bethancourt gazed fondly at his pet, who seemed to have taken to Leandra with a devotion not entirely explained by the ham.

  “Richard wants a dog,” said Leandra over her shoulder. “But he’s afraid I should end up taking care of it.”

  “Well, you probably would,” said the vicar.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. “Anyway, Steve Eberhart says those puppies of Mr. Powell’s will be ready to leave home in a week or so. I told him maybe we’d take one.”

  “Oh, really, Lee.” Tothill was laughing at her. “You always want me to have anything I fancy.”

  “What sort of dog is it?” asked Bethancourt.

  “They’re Kerry blue terriers, more or less,” answered the vicar.

  “Very appealing dogs,” said Bethancourt.

  “Well,” said the vicar doubtfully, “we’ll see.” He set three bottles of Bass on the table and then sat down himself, reaching for a page of notes.

  “Your sermon?” asked Bethancourt.

  “No, no.” Tothill produced a pair of half-glasses and peered at the paper. “Lee and I wrote down what we remembered Charlie saying about Eve,” he said. “It’s not very much, but you’re welcome to it.”

  Bethancourt sampled his beer, lit a cigarette, and leaned back with a sigh of content to listen.

  “We began,” said the vicar, “by trying to remember everything we knew about Eve, and then to trace it all back to where we had heard it in the first place. We both remember when Charlie first came here, and meeting him in the Deer and Hounds, but neither of us remember when we first knew he had a daughter.”

  “We probably asked about his family,” put in Leandra. “It’s the sort of thing one does.”

  “Anyway,” went on Tothill, “it was general knowledge that he was a widower and had a grown-up daughter living abroad. The next bit is that she was single—we’ve put that separately because Lee remembers it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember asking him if she had married a Frenchman and he said no, she had gone to a finishing school there, and that she was still single. And then he said that she travelled quite a bit, that she’d inherited the wanderlust from him. He seemed quite pleased about that, about sharing a trait with her.”

  “The other thing we remember,” said Tothill, “is that whenever he spoke of her, it was as if she was on the other side of the world. That must have come from his being so far away for so long.”

  Eve Bingham, Bethancourt recalled, had said much the same thing.

  “The next thing is much later, after we had got to know him. He mentioned one night being in Paris before he came back to England and I asked him why his daughter never visited, or why he didn’t go to see her. He seemed very surprised at the question, but after a minute or two he said he supposed there wasn’t any reason now that he was living in England, but that it was probably too late. I didn’t press it, though it seemed to me there was a story there. He was a very private man in many ways, and I didn’t like to pry. In my profession, curiosity is often viewed as meddling.”

  “As if,” snorted Leandra, “you had to go looking for problems to solve.”

  “No,” grinned Tothill, “I certainly don’t. The trouble is usually to convince people that I can’t solve their problems for them and that praying, although certainly admirable and uplifting, is rarely an answer in itself.”

  “People take comfort from it, though,” said Bethancourt.

  “Yes, but comfort isn’t always what they need.” Tothill looked rather stern. “If your husband is beating you, prayer may help you bear it, but it won’t make him stop. God does not deal in magic.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Leandra, coming over with the sandwiches.
“I didn’t know she had been to see you again.”

  “Yesterday,” said the vicar briefly, with a look at their guest which suggested discussion of the subject would be better left until they were alone.

  His wife took the hint smoothly, setting down the plates and taking her chair while she said, “I’ve put mustard on the sandwiches, Mr. Bethancourt. I do hope that’s all right?”

  “Brilliant,” Bethancourt assured her. He took a bite and found that indeed it was. “This is very nice,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

  “The ham came off the Brook farm,” she answered. “They’re marvelous with pigs. But we’ve got off the subject. What’s next on the list, my love?”

  Tothill looked back at his notes. “It’s rather superficial,” he said apologetically to Bethancourt. “But we thought you might as well have everything.”

  “Quite right,” said Bethancourt.

  “Charlie was talking about his wife one night,” continued the vicar, “and mentioned that Eve looked very much like her. He said it had been a bit of a shock, when he saw her in Paris, to find his daughter looking the way he remembered his wife. I think it was in the same conversation that we gathered that his wife had died young and that he had raised Eve himself. But he didn’t talk much about that part. As I say, it was really a conversation about his wife.”

  “It was rather touching,” said Leandra. “He was obviously still so very sorry he had lost her.”

  “That’s the worst of losing someone unexpectedly,” said Bethancourt. “It’s such a tragedy that you make a paragon of them and no one else can ever live up to that. I don’t mean to imply that Bingham’s marriage wasn’t ideal; very likely it was.”

  “No, I agree with you,” said the vicar. “Whether it was a perfect marriage or fraught with difficulties, losing one’s partner practically guarantees that one’s memory of it will be as perfect.”

  “Well, I think you’re both callous,” said Leandra. “I am sure Charlie loved his wife very much and was truly broken up over her death.”